Cultural iconoclast CAMILLE PAGLIA likes to throw punches, both physical and verbal, against smug formulas and codes of political correctness

"There is something in my book to offend absolutely everybody. I am proabortion, pro the legal use of drugs, propornography, child pornography, snuff films. And I am going after these things until Gloria Steinem screams."

The speaker -- at nonstop, sewing-machine speed -- is Camille Paglia, contrarian academic and feminist bete noire, and her 1990 book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press), is the most explosive tome to emerge from academe in quite some time. The book is about many things -- paganism, pop culture, androgyny, sexual conflicts -- but what has drawn the...